Free Thumbnail Slider for WordPress

August 30, 2017

Sliders are the most popular graphic elements on WordPress websites. People use them to show their image, media (e.g. video) or textual content in a clean and modern way. Sliders are usually placed below the main menu. This makes them the first thing a visitor sees upon arrival. Since sliders are in such a featured place, it’s important to let the visitors go to other slides easily. Usually, there are arrows and bullets which in some cases not so noticeable.

Free Thumbnail Slider

One of the best in-slider navigation elements are the thumbnails. Thumbnails are small images, showing the content of each slide. The most popular way to create such a slider is to show horizontal thumbnails below the slider. They have many benefits, they’re user friendly and they look great on any website. There are many free thumbnail slider plugins out there, but they aren’t as feature rich as Smart Slider 3.

The best free thumbnail slider for WordPress

Smart Slider 3 has many great features to create a nice looking free thumbnail slider. You can select the images from WordPress Media Library, without having to upload them again. If your images are not uploaded yet, you can upload them by dragging them next to the New Slide button. It’s easy to create a slider with thumbnail navigation in Smart Slider 3. When you have some images to show, all you need to do is to enable the thumbnail control.

There are many customization options in this free thumbnail slider plugin. You can change the color of the thumbnail bar, add borders, box shadow or extra CSS codes. The size and position of the thumbnail are adjustable. This allows you to place the thumbnail images wherever you would prefer to have them. You might put the thumbnails to a position where they’re above the slider. In this case, the thumbnails constantly cover the slider images, and that’s not good. Smart Slider 3 has an option to show the thumbnails only when the mouse is over the slider.

Note

Thumbnails with title and description

Thumbnail sliders are great for navigation. The user can preview the available slides and decide which one they would like to see. Then they can go to the desired slide without having to go through all the slides between. Most of the thumbnail sliders let you show only the actual thumbnail image. Smart Slider 3 took a step forward and lets you display the slide title and description. This helps the visitor get a better idea of the slide’s content.

Optimize your images in the slider

When you create a thumbnail slider, you probably have countless images you want to show. If these images were shot with a high resolution camera, they are probably large. Not only the image dimensions are huge, but the actual file sizes as well. A large image takes a lot of time to load, and you don’t want to keep your visitors waiting too much. Smart Slider 3 has a built in image resizing feature. It can resize the set slide background images to the slider size, or the set dimension. It also resizes the thumbnail images to the set size, giving you extra speed.

Animations and effects for your slider

Even the smallest animation gives a nice touch to the thumbnail slider. Smart Slider 3 offers lots of nice animations which play when the slides change. The most favored animation is the simple fade. This is the effect which doesn’t just animate the background images but the layers as well. The horizontal and vertical Main animation is often used. These animations are highly touch friendly. While swiping on the screen, it’s possible to preview the nearby slides. Since they’re Main animations, they move the layers with the background image. The most popular effects that aren’t Main animations are the Zoom and Fade background animation.

Show your content on your thumbnail slider

One of the most amazing features of Smart Slider 3 is the ability to create layers. Layers are containers to help you tell your story. For example, you can use a heading layer to show the image caption. Or show a button to direct the visitor to a specific page, e.g.: to your pricing page. You can also add extra images as layers. For example, to show a Facebook icon with a link on it. And there is a YouTube and Vimeo layer to display videos from these sites. If you display a video, you can change the thumbnail type, and it will show a play icon.